October 6, 2008

Come on, talk. I'll meet up with you later. I'm going to go listen to Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute talk about what sort of judges we might expect a President Obama/McCain to appoint. The event is down the hall from my office, and I'm hoping for lots of good discussion from UW lawprofs and students. If anyone says something truly interesting, I'll have my laptop and I may live-blog it.

But this post isn't about McCain, Obama, or the Supreme Court in particular. This is a café post, which means you're on your own. Talk about anything.

Yesterday I was listening to my XM radio and heard Martha Stewart trying to sell me on the new "Best of Sirius" package: a collection of Sirius channels that you can get on XM now with an extra subscription fee.

Hearing her promote her own station seemed reasonable enough. But it was quite funny to hear her talk about "All NASCAR, all the time" and the NFL network.

@chickenlittle: I'm pretty sure it's 1962 this season on the show. I think the episodes are available on the internet to watch, but I had trouble watching them. With the advent of DVD, I almost think I'd rather watch a whole season of television at once rather than an episode a week.

It's on the very inaptly named American Movie Classics. I say that not because of Mad Men but because very few of the films they air could be considered classics, and when they do air the classics, they butcher them by airing them full screen.

I guess this is as good of a time as any, to tell everyone that I put an electric motor on my corn sheller. I had to change the rotation of the motor from clockwise to counter clockwise. A man's work is never done.

Lorelei, yeah, I used to like TCM better. Alas, I have no cable, I prefer my DVDs and Netflix. However, I do miss certain shows and channels.

TCM is much better. I'd probably be better off with cable, as I watch entirely too much of it. The nice thing about TV on DVD is that you only have to wait a little while and then you can have the whole season of your favorite show at your finger tips.

I was okay with the cowboys, even with Romo because he's a Wisconsin boy afterall....but I can't get past the whole Jessica Simpson thing. I mean, the woman just looks like she's a walking petrie dish.

Lawgiver knows we are coming for him and his merry band of Romosexuals. Just wait till Big Blue comes to call. I mean I haven't seen the Redskins slaughter the Cowboys so bad since the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

AllenS, that reminds me, in 1994 when the last Castro-approved massive "rafters" exodus was in full swing in Cuba; my next door neighbors built a boat from scratch. Well, it was more like a modern day Noah's Ark. The used a trailer truck engine to power it. Got it all ready, but the thing was too wide, so they demolished a part of the house's side fence to get it out. Paid some guy to use another truck to tow it to the beach. The whole neighborhood was present to see them off. They finally got to the beach threw the boat in, floated it, rowed a few miles in before starting the engine. They finally started the engine, and to their immense sadness, they discovered that the propeller had been installed incorrectly. They rowed their way back to shore with the idea of fixing it the next day, but that night Fidel went on radio and TV, and said that the "doors" were been shut again.

It took them 9 years to attempt anything similar, this time in a 1949 sealed station wagon(coincidentally the same wagon that brought my grandma to the airport in 1981 when she left for the US). I am not lying. I grew up in El Diezmero, from where this people came, and they were my next door neighbors. I flipped out when I saw their picture online.

I would love to be in Tony's pants, I mean, I would love to be in his position, err, what I really mean is why does he date that Simpson girl, I mean really, why date a cartoon? There are plenty of exquisite, smart, rich girls who I am sure would love to date him.

I recall Althouse commenting that Michael Douglas's face always reminded her of a scrotum. I've been studying this picture, and I still don't see any resemblence to Michael Douglas. Can anyone help me out here?

“I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers,” [Obama] explained. “Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris.”

I have a shop full of tools. I love to make and repair stuff. The only thing that I don't have is a metal lathe, but I have a good friend who is a machinist who will machine tool something if I need it. I repair my cars, tractors and machinery. I've marveled at those Cubans with the ingenuity to keep those old cars running, and the ability to make something floatable reach this country. We're better off as a nation when they reach the shore.

I love Aunt Esther. She was like all the older church ladies I knew as a kid. The ones from the Protestant church over on Clinton St. A holy terror. But the salt of the earth. Mean as a snake though. Don't get on her bad side. God bless her.

Trooper York - Don't remember using "Jew-boy" - my beef with Jews is about disproportionate power being used against average American citizen's culture and economic/international interests.

Not hating them.

If they didn't have such power, or had power but stayed out of other people's business, they would have had a better reception...

And perhaps you would agree that the Feds should be seizing the passports and blocking foreign travel of hundreds of Wall Street fatcats pending criminal investigations...as was done with the US and Israeli passports of Fast Andy Fastow & Family in the Enron book-cooking?

Trooper: I don't follow football much even though my sis owns part of Lambeau Field [Dad was on the waiting list fo 30 years for that opportunity], but Tony Romo appears in Peephole Mag pretty regularly. He must be stupid to choose Jessica Simpson over Carrie Underwood. Just sayin'.

Levi Stubbs? The guy who did the singing voice of Audrey II in the movie The Little Shop of Horrors?

AMC used to be what TCM is now. (No commercials, classic films most of the time.) I don't know if they switched because their ratings were bad or because TCM spun off and took 80% of the good movies with them.

I realized it was over for them when they showed a Godzilla sequel. Neither Americn nor a classic, barely even a movie....

And perhaps you would agree that the Feds should be seizing the passports and blocking foreign travel of hundreds of Wall Street fatcats pending criminal investigations...as was done with the US and Israeli passports of Fast Andy Fastow & Family in the Enron book-cooking?

If you told Americans the people responsible for decimating their investments and retirement were muslim economic terrorists that hacked into their accounts, and the government answered with giving them 700 billion taxpayer dollars more as a reward I think you'd see riots in the streets 100% guaranteed. And rightfully so. But what's amazing is not what is illegal, it's what is legal. Steve Jobs got $70 million of stock options at a meeting of the board of Apple company directors that never took place. George Bush owes almost his entire fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket and into the use of eminent domain laws.

My theme today is food. Breakfast was a glass of Kool-Aid and two chocolate chip cookies. Prickly cactus puree surfaced this afternoon. Now, I'm fixing dinner. So far, into the pot have gone several Italian sausages, grilled onions, garlic, marjoram, thyme, roma tomatoes, sweet basil, and a dash of sugar to thwart the acidic thing that goes on with tomatoes.

Here's the big question. Do we serve this over some pasta, or do I thicken it up and add some other stuff, making a stew-like concoction? It's not too late to call my wife, and have her bring some more things home from town, to toss into the pot.

Lorelei Leigh says:Lorelei:, here is the entire Are You Being Served? collection at Amazon

Thanks. I went to look for it after the earlier discussion. I'll have to save my pennies to buy it. Perhaps I'll see what they have at Netflix in the meantime.

Check it out for free from your local public library. If they don't have it, request that they obtain it for you, season by season, via an interlibrary loan. It'll probably take a month or two to arrive.

There has been some notice of the foriegn contribution Senator Obama has from such people as Hamas. Unlike both Hillary Clinton and John McCain he has refused to document who these "overseas contributions might be."

(Topic carried over from another thread, so it can appear on one of the primary Althouse pages.)

I spent some time the other day debunking our resident troll's ignorant and incorrect assertions (involving “carbon dating” and the like) about how the ages of fossils are determined. Given that Troll's wrong, just how are sedimentary rocks and the fossils within them actually dated?

Though various supplemental means are known by which fossils and rocks can be dated according to particular circumstances, the predominant method is to start off initially relatively dating by means of a phenomenon known as the geologic column — a mass of jigsaw-puzzle-like information painstakingly pieced together by geologists and paleontologists over the last two hundred years.

What is the “geologic column”? Wikipedia doesn't even have an article of that name, though other articles there do touch on the subject (for those who'd prefer referring to that source). Encyclopædia Britannica is also a worthwhile source. I'm going to skip all that, though, and just wing it here on my own.

It is an observational fact, extensively made use of by the sciences of geology and paleontology (aka evolution), that the sedimentary layers located within the Earth's crust are found to be massively sorted and organized, so that fossils of the denizens of various chronological time periods appear only in the vertically stratified layers appropriate to their life epoch.

The implications of this profound synthesis of fact extend far beyond the common evolutionary observation-prediction that humans and dinosaurs never coexisted and thus can never be found fossilized together. It makes use of the larger encompassing truth that the remains of all living things deposited during every period of geological natural history never overlap (other than in situations that can be seen to have been later extraneously disturbed or intermixed) with those of creatures from other time periods — with the “exception that proves the rule” of certain organisms (known as “living fossils” when they happen to have survived up to the present day) that have remained almost unchanged over lengthy intervals of time.

It is the fact of the geologic column which overwhelmingly convincingly demonstrates, among other things, that the Creationist pie-in-the-sky of Noah's flood (the mythical catastrophe whence all animals but the few who supposedly made it aboard the Ark, excluding such prehistoric monsters as dinosaurs according to latter-day Creationist rationalization, all bought it) never ever occurred, as it would be essentially impossible — there is really no way, naturally speaking (though Creationists are thoroughgoing rationalizers) — that something like a single chaotic flood could produce the detailed (what we comprehend to be chronological) sorting of sediments and fossils exhibited by the geologic column of the Earth.

Thus, initial relative dating via the geologic column consists of identifying the community of fossilized organisms — flora and fauna — found within a particular geological sedimentary stratum (perhaps including their neighbors in adjacent strata as a check), then looking up in the geological column just where those creatures are located, and thus when they (relatively) lived.

(Creationists like to pretend that utilizing the geologic column for dating is a kind of “circular reasoning” — which is not the case at all — but if any here are curious, I'll be happy to discuss it further.)

Given knowledge obtained by the foregoing means of fossils' and rocks' relative ages, how does one thereby date them absolutely? Simple. One locates instances — anywhere in the world, not necessarily nearby particular fossils of interest — where segments of the sedimentary geological column are seen to overlie beds of lava, ash, and pyroclastic flow resulting from earlier volcanic eruptions, and which in turn are overlain by later such volcanic deposits.

Volcanic deposits, being igneous in nature, are absolutely datable via radiometric techniques such Argon-Argon, and above and below they bracket the ages of any sedimentary deposits (and hence any fossils) laid down in between. Voila!

Moreover, you're very much mistaken, in my view, that any thoughtful Christian would seriously entertain such a notion — as it basically transforms God into the “Great Deceiver,” who has lied to us from one end of this astonishing universe we live in to the other in order simply to entice us to conclude a falsehood. That's not any God I'd believe in.

“The same day Sarah Palin told Katie Couric that ‘science should be taught in science class,’ a group of scientists were making that very point to the Texas Board of Education. Is Sarah Palin a closet evolutionist?

“Hardly, but it's difficult to peg her as the sort of strict Creationist many academics and people of faith accuse of trying to undermine the teaching of evolution. Like many people of faith, Palin seems to believe that science and religion are not necessarily incompatible and that a good education should make room for both. […]

“Kouric asked: ‘Do you believe evolution should be taught as an accepted scientific principle or as one of several theories?’

“Palin responsed: ‘Oh, I think it should be taught as an accepted principle. And, as you know, I say that also as the daughter of a school teacher, a science teacher, who has really instilled in me a respect for science. It should be taught in our schools. And I won't deny that I see the hand of God in this beautiful creation that is Earth. But that is not part of the state policy or a local curriculum in a school district. Science should be taught in science class.’ […]

“It shouldn't be part of her father's science class curriculum anymore than evolution should be part of her own child's Sunday school lessons. For many people of faith, the question isn't whether science and religion can comfortably coexist, but how.

“The best suggestion I've read can be found in ‘An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science from American Christian Clergy,’ signed so far by more than 11,000 clergy across the country.

“‘We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist,’ the letter reads in part. ‘We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.’”

Moreover, you're very much mistaken, in my view, that any thoughtful Christian would seriously entertain such a notion — as it basically transforms God into the “Great Deceiver,” who has lied to us from one end of this astonishing universe we live in to the other in order simply to entice us to conclude a falsehood. That's not any God I'd believe in.

Then you must believe that Adam and Eve lacked belly buttons. Because belly buttons would demonstrate that God was trying to deceive us into believing that Adam and Eve were born of women, and you would never believe in a deceptive God.

I must believe that? As I've stated here before — I'm no Creationist. Adam and Eve never existed, as a single couple. Humanity arose among a group of thousands of evolving individuals. Go peddle your “gotcha” crap somewhere else.

Who says I'm “speaking for the Creationists”? What are you, a troll like Plagiarizing Michael? Nor is opposing ignorant obnoxious plagiarizing Michael, whose total intent here is in disrupting the comments section of this blog, equivalent to “speaking for the Creationists.” And if I “are one,” funny that I would a) repeatedly declare that I am not, while b) explicating good science with regard to nature of evolution, almost alone on these threads.